Huggy Rao and I continue to be focused on the launch of our new book Scaling Up Excellence. But every now and then i can't resist doing something different I got an email the other day from Harvard Business Review writer Karen Dillon. Here is what she asked. After reading it, I realized that it is such a hard question that I could use some help:

I'm working on a guidebook on the topic of office politics for HBR. It's a highly practical guide, part of a popular HBR guidebook series providing solutions for real-world problems. Each chapter identifies a challenge many people share, gives a real world example, and then asks experts how to navigate the challenge. The goal is to get away from the concept of office politics as a 'dirty' game and instead see it as a way of having a strategy for dealing with the vast array of complex human begins with whom you need to work.

I'd love to interview you for the chapter on how to work with people you really, really, really, really don't like. In fact, I can't imagine this chapter without getting you to weigh in!

Are you game?

Any suggestions? How have you dealt with this challenge? What tactics and strategies work? Which are risky or unwise?

I am working on other things these days, and indeed, it has been over six years since The No Asshole Rulewas published. But as my friends remind me, no matter what else I ever do, or did before, I will be known as "the asshole guy." Below is an email I got last night. I think it is legimate, but can't promise it. Note the headline of this post is taken straight from his email, which is mike@pitmancasting.com.

If you contact the guy, I would love a report:

Bob,

My name is Mike and I am casting producer in Los Angeles.
I am working on a show right now that you and your readers should find
interesting.

One of the types of stories we are looking for involve
workplace sabotage. These assholes in the workplace do things to the rest of us
ranging from prank-level to malicious. Sometimes the effects aren't known until
much later.

This show will take a look at the long term consequences
and results of our actions and how they affect others. There will even be a
chance for restoration and reconciliation.

I'd love to tell you more if you'd be interested in
putting a notice on your site or even a Tweet!

It is Thanksgiving morning here in California and I was thinking of all the good things in my life I have to be thankful for, just as I know that so many of you are thinking today. I thought it would be nice to reprint a story and poem I first posted on this blog over five years ago, on the day The No Asshole Rule was published and it was updated shortly after on the day Vonnegut died. The key part is Vonnegut's Joe Heller poem, one of the last things he published before he died. His message that reminding ourselves how much we have (rather than how much we want), that so many of us "have enough," is timeless and especially fitting for the day. Enjoy and have a happy Thanksgiving.

I just heard that Kurt Vonnegut died. I loved his books and was touched by his sweet contribution, for creating the best moment I had when writing the book. His death makes me sad to think about, but his life brings me joy. All of us die in the end, it is the living that counts -- and Vonnegut touched so many people. Here is my story.

The process of writing The No Asshole Rule entailed many fun twists and turns. But the very best thing happened when I wrote for permission to reprint a Kurt Vonnegut poem called "Joe Heller," which was published in The New Yorker. I was hoping that Vonnegut would give me permission to print it in the book, both because I love the poem (more on that later), and Vonnegut is one my heroes. His books including Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions had a huge effect on me when I was a teenager-- both the ideas and the writing style.

I wrote some anonymous New Yorker address to ask permission to reprint the poem, and to my amazement, I received this personal reply from Vonnegut about two weeks later. Take a look at the two sides of the postcard, it not only is in Vonnegut's handwriting and gives me permission to use it "however you please without compensation or further notice to me," the entire thing is designed by Vonnegut (and I suspect his wife helped, as she is a designer). "Life is No Way to Treat an Animal" is one of the famous sayings from his character Kilgore Trout -- even the stamp is custom. It is one of my favorite things.

The poem fits well in my chapter on how to avoid catching asshole poisoning. Here is how I set it up in the book:

'If you read or watch TV programs about
business or sports, you often see the world framed as place where everyone
wants “more more more” for “me me me,” every minute in every way.
The old bumper sticker sums it up: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” The
potent but usually unstated message is that we are all trapped in a life-long
contest where people can never get enough money, prestige, victories, cool
stuff, beauty, or sex – and that we do want and should want more goodies than
everyone else.

This attitude fuels a quest for constant
improvement that has a big upside, leading to everything from more beautiful
athletic and artistic performances, to more elegant and functional products, to
better surgical procedures and medicines, to more effective and humane
organizations. Yet when taken too far,
this blend of constant dissatisfaction, unquenchable desires, and overbearing
competitiveness can damage your mental health. It can lead you to treat those “below” you as inferior creatures who are
worthy of your disdain and people "above" you who have more stuff and status as
objects of envy and jealousy.

Again, a bit of framing can help. Tell yourself, “I have enough.” Certainly,
some people need more than they have, as many people on earth still need a safe
place to live, enough good food to eat, and other necessities. But too many of
us are never satisfied and feel constantly slighted, even though – by objective
standards – we have all we need to live a good life. I got this idea from a lovely little poem
that Kurt Vonnegut published in The New
Yorker called “Joe Heller,” which was about the author of the renowned
World War II novel Catch 22. As you can see, the poem describes a party
that Heller and Vonnegut attended at a billionaire’s house. Heller remarks to Vonnegut that he has
something that the billionaire can never have, "The knowledge that I've
got enough." These wise words
provide a frame that can help you be at peace with yourself and to treat those
around you with affection and respect:

Joe Heller

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!"

--Kurt Vonnegut

The New Yorker,
May 16th, 2005

(Reprinted with Kurt Vonnegut’s permission -- see the above postcard!)

P.S. I also added another post about Vonnegut after this one that was good fun, which talked about my favorite quote.

P.P.S. The first version of this post was written on February 22nd, the day The No Asshole Rule was published. I then updated in mid-April of 2007, after I heard that Vonnegut had died. This is the third update because it seems like such a great Thanksgiving message.

About 15 years ago, UC Berkeley's Barry Staw
and I had a running conversation about the conditions under which
showing anger, even having a temper tantrum, is strategic versus
something that undermines a person's reputation and influence, and for
leaders, the performance of their teams and organizations. In fact,
Barry eventually collected some amazing in-the-locker room half-time
speeches for basketball coaches that he is currently working on writing
and publishing.

I thought of those old conversations when I got
this amazing note the other day (this is the same one that inspired me
to do my last post on the Atilla the Manager cartoon):

I just discovered your work via Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist. I had an
asshole boss until I got her fired. For 6 years I was abused and I should have
done what you say and got out as soon as I could. But you get comfortable and
used to the abuse. You even think you are successfully managing the abusers
behavior with your behavior. Ridiculous I know. I suffered everything you
mentioned including depression, anxiety and just plain unhappiness. The day I
snapped, I used the "I quit and I'm taking you down with me" tactic.
I did document the abuse even though just like every asshole situation, everyone
knew she was an abuser. In an impassioned meeting I let top management know
exactly why I was quitting, let them know they are culpable for all the mental
anquish and turnover and poor results stemming from the asshole. They probably
thought I was a madman with nothing left to lose and about to sue and defame
the company (they'd have been correct). Two hours later she was walked out. Now
the department is doing great and actually producing instead of trying to
manage the reactions of a lunatic.

I am taken with this note for
numerous reasons. For starters, I am always delighted when the victim
of an asshole finds a successful way to to fight back. I am also
pleased to see that, as happens so often, once this creep was sent
packing, people could stop spending their days trying to deal with her
antics and instead could devote their energies to doing their jobs well.
And in thinking about it in more detail -- and thinking back to those
old conversations with Barry -- I believe that showing anger was
effective in this situation for at least three reasons.

1. He was right.
This was, as the headline says, an evidence-based temper tantrum.
Although his superiors may have not been overly pleased with how he
delivered the news, he apparently had darn good evidence that this
person was an asshole and doing harm to him and his co-workers. Facts
matter, even when emotions flare.

2. His anger was a reflection of how others felt, not just his particular quirks and flaws.
This outpouring of anger and the ultimatum he gave were seen as giving
voice to how everyone who worked with this "lunatic" felt. It was his
tantrum, but it was on behalf of and gave voice to others. In such
situations, when a person is not seen as out of touch reality or crazy,
even though he may have felt or even acted like a "madman" for the
moment, the anger and refusal to give in can be very powerful. I also
suspect that, in this case, those same bosses who fired him felt he same
way about the local asshole, and his anger propelled them to take an
action they knew was the right thing to do. The notion that emotions are
contagious and propel action is quite well established in a lot of
studies (see research by Elaine Hatfield for example).

3. The was a rare tantrum.
This follows from the last point. If you are always ranting and
yelling and making threats, people aren't likely to take you
seriously. Tantrums are effective when they are seen as a rare and
justified outburst rather than a personal characteristic -- as something
that is more easily attributed to the bad situation the person is in
rather than personal weakness or style.

Please, please don't use
this fellow's success as a reason to start yelling and making threats
and all that. That is what a certified asshole would do. But -- while
such outbursts are not always the product of rational planning -- this
little episode provides instructive guidance about when expressing anger
might produce outcomes for the greater good. It also provides some
interesting hints about when it is best to try to stop outbursts from
those you are close to versus when egging them on is a reasonable thing
to do.

Finally, a big thanks to the anonymous writer of this note. I learned something from it and I hope that other do as well.

I got a note from a manager about this cartoon and story at the Marketoonist, which is drawn and written by Tim Fishburne -- he talks about The No Asshole Rule and the problem of brillant jerks. Check out his site, it is filled with great stuff -- like this cartoon and story about my least-favorite U.S. company, United Airlines.

P.S. I am sorry I have not been blogging much, I am hoping to turn up the volume and have a lot of things to write about, especially Matt May's new book The Laws of Subtraction. But life keeps getting in the way!

William Gibson is one of the most influential and out there science fiction writers of our time. Read about him here and here. He is credited with first usign the term "cyberspace" in a 1982 story and Wikipedia claims "He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web." He is also credited with one of my favorite quotes "The future is already here -- it is just not very evenly distrubited.

I confess that as an avid reader of The New York Times, I have been disappointed in recent years because they devote too much space to interviews with CEOs and other bosses. Notably, it seems to me that they run the same column twice every Sunday: Adam Bryant's "The Corner Office" and another interview column called "The Boss." I do love many of these interviews anyway, as The Times gets interesting people and their editing makes things better. And I am a big fan of Adam Bryant's book, The Corner Office, as it did a great job of transcending the column. What bugs me, however, is that The Times devotes so much of the paper to interviews now, I suspect, because it is simply cheaper than producing hard-hitting investigative journalism. They do an occasional amazing in-depth story, but there is too much fluff and not enough tough for my tastes.

That said, some of the interviews are still striking. One of the best I have ever read appeared a couple years back, with Citrix CEO Mark Templeton. The whole interview is unusually thoughtful and reminds me that people who don't see themselves as CEOs and don't lust after the position often turn out to be the best candidate for the job (related point: see this study that shows groups tend to pick people with big mouths to lead but that less pushy and extroverted leaders tend to lead more effective teams -- at least when the teams were composed of proactive members). In particular, however, I was taken with this quote from Templeton:

You have to make sure you never confuse the hierarchy that you need for managing complexity with the respect that people deserve. Because that’s where a lot of organizations go off track, confusing respect and hierarchy, and thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect. So hierarchy is a necessary evil of managing complexity, but it in no way has anything to do with respect that is owed an individual.

If you say that to everyone over and over and over, it allows people in the company to send me an e-mail no matter what their title might be or to come up to me at any time and point out something — a great idea or a great problem or to seek advice or whatever.

There is so much wisdom here, including:

1. While there are researchers and other idealists running around and urging companies to rip down their hierarchies and to give everyone equal power and decision rights, and this notion that we are all equal in every way may sound like a lovely thought, the fact is that people prefer and need pecking orders and other trappings of constraint such as rules and procedures. As Templeton points out so wisely, organizations need hierarchies to deal with complexity. Yes, some hierarchies are better than others -- some are too flat, some have to many layers, some have bad communication flows, and organizational designers should err on making them as "light" and "simple" as possible -- but as he says, they are a necessary evil.

2. His second point really hits home and is something that all too many leaders -- infected with power poisoning -- seem to forget as they sit at the top of the local pecking order "thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect." When leaders believe and especially act on this belief, all sorts of good things happen, including your best people stay (even if you can't pay them as much as competitors), they feel obligated to return the respect by giving their all to the organization (and feel obligated to press their colleagues to do as well), and a norm of treating people with dignity and respect emerges and is sustained. Plus, as Templeton points out, because fear is low and respect is high, people at the top tend to get more truth -- and less CYA and ass-kissing behavior.

No organization is perfect. But a note for all the bosses out there. If you read Templeton's quote a few times and think about what it means for running your organization, it can help you take a big step toward excellence in terms of both the performance and well-being among the people you lead.

You have probably have heard of Geoffrey Nunberg -- that brilliant and funny linguist on NPR. He has a brand new asshole book called Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First 60 years. I first heard about it a few weeks back when I was contacted by George Dobbins from the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. He asked if I might moderate Nunberg's talk on August 15th, given we are now fellow asshole guys. I was honored to accept the invitation and I hope you can join us that evening -- you are in for a treat.

The book is a satisfying blend of great scholarship, wit, and splendid logic. It is a joy from start to finish, and the reviewers agree. I loved the first sentence of the Booklist review “Only an asshole would say this book is offensive. Sure, it uses the A-word a lot, but this is no cheap attempt to get laughs written by a B-list stand-up comic."

Nunberg starts with a magnificent first chapter called The Word, which talks about the battles between "Assholes and Anti-assholes." I love this sentence about the current state of public discourse in America "It sometimes seems as if every corner of our public discourse is riddled with people depicting one another as assholes and treating them accordingly, whether or not they actually use the word." As he states later in the chapter, he doesn't have a stance for or against the word (although the very existence of the book strikes me as support for it), the aim of the book is to "explore the role that the notion of the asshole has come to play in our lives."

He then follows-up with one delightful chapter after another, I especially loved "The Rise of Talking Dirty," "The Asshole in the Mirror," and "The Allure of Assholes." I get piles of books every year about bullies, jerks, toxic workplaces, and on and on. Although this isn't a workplace book, it is the best book I have ever read that is vaguely related to the topic.

I admired how deftly he treated "The Politics of Incivility" in the chapter on "The Assholism of Public Life." Nunberg makes a compelling argument that critics on the right and the left both use the tactic of claiming that an opponent is rude, nasty, or indecent -- that they are acting like assholes and ought to apologize immediately. Nunberg documents "the surge of patently phony indignation for all sides," be it calling out people for "conservative incivility" or "liberal hate." He captures much of this weird and destructive game with the little joke "Mind your manners, asshole."

I am barely scratching the surface, there is so much wisdom here, and it is all so fun. Read the book. Read and listen to this little piece that Nunberg did recently on NPR. This part is lovely:

Well, profanity makes hypocrites of us all. But without hypocrisy, how could profanity even exist? To learn what it means to swear, a child has to both hear the words said and be told that it's wrong to say them, ideally by the same people. After all, the basic point of swearing is to demonstrate that your emotions have gotten the better of you and trumped your inhibitions

I can't even recall quite when it happened, but several month back a Wired reporter named Ben Austen called me about a piece he was doing on Steve Jobs' legacy. I confess that kept the conversation short, in large part because I was just getting tired of the story -- and I think everyone else is as well. But this turned into the cover story, which -- despite my lack of enthusiasm about the topic -- is one of the most balanced and well-researched pieces I have seen. At least that became my biased opinion after I saw that he plugged my last two books in the final three paragraphs! Here is the whole piece if you want to read it and here is my argument -- you can read the whole excerpt about Jobs as a Rorschach test here, where I put it in earlier post. Here is how Ben Austen ended his piece:

As he was writing his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, felt obligated to include a chapter on “the virtues of assholes,” as he puts it, in large part because of Jobs and his reputation even then as a highly effective bully. Sutton granted in this section that intimidation can be used strategically to gain power. But in most situations, the asshole simply does not get the best results. Psychological studies show that abusive bosses reduce productivity, stifle creativity, and cause high rates of absenteeism, company theft, and turnover—25 percent of bullied employees and 20 percent of those who witness the bullying will eventually quit because of it, according to one study.

When I asked Sutton about the divided response to Jobs’ character, he sent me an excerpt from the epilogue to the new paperback edition of his Good Boss, Bad Boss, written two months after Jobs’ death. In it he describes teaching an innovation seminar to a group of Chinese CEOs who seemed infatuated with Jobs. They began debating in high-volume Mandarin whether copying Jobs’ bad behavior would improve their ability to lead. After a half-hour break, Sutton returned to the classroom to find the CEOs still hollering at one another, many of them emphatic that Jobs succeeded because of—not in spite of—his cruel treatment of those around him.

Sutton now thinks that Jobs was too contradictory and contentious a man, too singular a figure, to offer many usable lessons. As the tale of those Chinese CEOs demonstrates, Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”

The point at which I really decided that the Jobs obsession was both silly and dangerous came about a month after his death. Huggy Rao and I were doing an interview on scaling-up excellence with a local CEO who founded a very successful company -- you would recognize the name of his company. After I stopped recording the interview, this guy -- who has a reputation as a caring, calm, and wickedly smart CEO -- asked Huggy Rao and me if we thought he had to be an asshole like Jobs in order for his company to achieve the next level of success.... he seemed genuinely worried that his inability to be nasty to people was career limiting.

Ugh. I felt rather ill and argued that it was important to be tough and do the dirty work when necessary, but treating people like dirt along way was not the path to success as a leader or a human-being. Perhaps this is my answer to the Steve Jobs Rorschach test: I believe that Jobs succeeded largely despite rather than because of the abuse he sometimes heaped on people. Of course, this probably tells you more about me than Jobs!

That is the title of weird interview that just came out in INC this month, which I did with Leigh Buchanan. And the above drawing is by Graham Roumieu.

Here is the story on the INC website. The title is different online than in the print version, they call it "Thoroughly Counterintuitive Approach to Leading."

Leigh is always fun to talk to, and after having done interviews on both The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, she has emerged as one of my favorite journalists. For starters, she has such a sense of fun -- most of us involved in doing and working with management are entirely too serious -- I certainly plead guilty. Leigh has the rare ability to talk about real ideas while at the same time conveying the absurdity of so much of organizational life . She is also a great editor. In every interview I have done with her, I've rambled incoherently on for an hour or so, and she somehow put it in a form that made sense.

This new interview a conglomeration of some of the stranger ideas from the various books I have written, especially Weird Ideas That Work along with some new twists. As with weird ideas , I offer these ideas to challenge your assumptions (and my own) and to prompt us all to think. I don't expect you to agree with them (I am not even sure I agree with all of them), but there is actually a fair amount of evidence and theory to support each of these sometimes uncomfortable ideas.

To give you a taste,here is how the interview kicks-off:

Leigh: You and I have been e-mailing about leadership traits, and at one point you suggested, “Good leaders know when to be boring, vague, emotionally detached, and authoritarian.” Under what circumstances might such traits be desirable? Start with boring.

Me: There are two situations in which it’s a good idea to be boring. One is when you’re working on something but, so far, all you’ve got is bad news. Under those circumstances, any outside attention is bad.

Don Petersen was the CEO of Ford after the Iaccoca era, and he was responsible for turning the company around. He told me a story about being invited to speak at the National Press Club. He didn’t want to do it. At the time, Ford had no good cars at all. But he and his PR chief decided he would go and give a speech about the most boring subject they could think of. At the time, that was safety. He practiced speaking in the most boring way possible, using the passive voice and long sentences. He put up charts that were hard to read, and then turned his back to the audience to talk about the charts. After that, the press lost interest in him for a while, so he could concentrate on doing the work.

The other situation is when you’re dealing with controversy. Stanford used to have this brilliant provost, James Rosse. When Jim talked about something like the school’s Nobel Prize winners, he would be animated and exciting and charismatic. But when he had to talk about something like the lack of diversity on campus, he would ramble on for 20 minutes while looking at his feet. I thought it was brilliant

And so it goes. I hope you enjoy and I think Leigh for being such a delight to work with and for reminding me not to take myself so seriously.

The No Asshole Rule emphasizes that one of the best ways to avoid the negative effects of workplaces that will leave you feeling demeaned and de-energized is to carefully assess your boss and colleagues during the interview and recruitment process. Guy Kawasaki and I had fun with this challenge a few years back when we developed a list of 10 signs that your future boss is likely to be a bosshole. In this spirit, I got a remarkable note the other day from a fellow who used his job interview to determine that his future boss was likely to be an asshole. Note the often subtle signs he observed. This are his exact words, I just removed a couple key sentences (with his permission) to protect his identity:

Dr. Sutton,

Just wanted to thank you. I read your "no Asshole rule" book on the plane my way to an interview. I suspected from our initial phone interview that he could be a jerk. I decided to take a new approach to the interview...to see how he interacted with shop floor employees and people that worked directly for him, to see how he spoke to me, and his verbal and visual actions, to see if I wanted this position instead of trying to impress them so they want to hire me. I watched people that worked for him stand away from him when talking to him. I saw he never smiled, and no one smiled at him. He passed people on the line without so much as a nod to them. And to top it off, he cut me off TWICE when I was talking like I wasn't even speaking, and then once even rudely didn't even PRETEND to listen to me as I talked about my background. In fact, I believe he started looking around and saying "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh" rudely "rushing me along" about 15 seconds into my background discussion. To top it off, I remember you saying "assholes hire assholes", so I asked him if he had recommended the hiring of the people on his current team, and he boldly bragged "I hire EVERYONE on my team, it is all MY decision"...so I turned down the offer. I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole. . And life is too short to do that again.

I find this guy to be very astute. What do you think of his analysis?

What are other signs that you look for that a future boss -- or colleague --is likely to be a certified asshole?

I sent out a tweet the other day about a study showing that men who score high on a narcissism test appear to experience more stress than those who score low (but not narcissistic women). Stress was measured by "cortisol levels," a hormone that "signals the level of activation of the body’s key stress response system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis."

You can see a report about study here. I thought the most interesting part was the link to the 40 item Narcissistic Personality Quiz, which is based on the measure in this paper: Raskin, R. & Terry, H. (1988). A Principal-Components Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and Further Evidence of Its Construct Validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5). Note that Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is one of the best and most rigorous psychology journals, so the source is excellent.

Try taking the quiz. I just did and scored an "8,' which suggests a low level of narcissism. I confess, however, that I am wondering if my low score was a reflection of my lack of narcissism or of my knowledge of the narcissism literature in concert with a bit of self-delusion. I also confess that I completed it a second time as if I were one especially narcissistic boss that I once worked with. That boss (in my opinion) earns a 32 -- a very high score as above 20 indicates narcissism. The quiz omits one thing this person did which indicates narcissism: It was amazing how, no matter what the topic, how within 3 minutes, every conversation with that boss always became conversation about what a successful and impressive person he was and all the people who admired him and his work.

If you really are the mood for self-assessment, you can take both this quiz and the (less scientific) Asshole Rating Self-Exam or ARSE. That way you can find out if you are a narcissist, a certified asshole, or both!

Even though it has been five years since The No Asshole Rule was published in hardback, I still get 15 or 20 emails a week about issues pertinent to the book -- descriptions of workplace tyrants and creeps, on how to avoid breeding them, and on what to do about them when you work with one -- or a lot of them.

This blog would contain nothing but "asshole stories" and I would be posting a couple times a day if I reported them all. Clearly, that would be both boring and depressing. And I am interested in other things. But every now and and then, I get one that is so well-crafted that I feel compelled to post it. I got a great one yesterday.

I don't want to put the whole email here both because it is so detailed and because I don't want to reveal any names. But the fellow who wrote this had quite an experience and did a great job of describing how he fought back. Here are some key excerpts (with some deletions to obscure identities):

His note starts:

I just finished reading The No A$$hole rule for a second time (I use $ instead of "s" just in case your email filters emails with the word "A$$hole," though I'd bet it does not. I'm just airing on the side of caution). Here is my reaction. Feel free to use my full name and any contents of this email in any of your published works. Back in 2005, I began my second job out of college working as a project manager at a marketing company. It was, and still is, a family business consisting of about 100 total employees. Here is a snippet what I endured, for nearly 7 years, from the A$$hole Family.

This is a partial list of behaviors in the cesspool where he worked:

If I was eating something, a bag of potato chips for example, the President would walk into my cubicle, stick his hands in the bag, then look at me and say, "Can I have some?"

Someone would walk into my cubicle and have a conversation with the person in the cube across from me...while I was on the phone!

A coworker of mine made a mistake on a project, so the VP of Sales sent the client an email, copying my boss, which said something to the effect of, "I just fired ____. This mistake was completely unacceptable, and please accept my apology. We don't tolerate people like that here..." Ironically enough, it was a lie; ____ was never fired, but just moved off the account.

The family members would routinely yell across the entire office to one another

I was having a meeting with a vendor in a conference room. The door was shut. The Sales Consultant walked in, sans knocking, and proceeded to say, "I need this room" and set her things on the conference table. And no, she had not reserved the conference room; reserving a conference room in this company was far-too-advanced of an idea.

[A married couple] who also worked at the A$$hole company were going through a divorce. They routinely had shouting and yelling matches, followed by slamming drawers, desks, and just about anything else that could make a loud noise and disrupt everyone in the office.

[One family member] often spoke to me like I was a 5-year old child (she did the same to most underlings, especially the men), and always loudly enough so everyone in the surrounding area could hear that I was being thrown under the bus. She liked to make an example of her victims. Oddly enough, she apparently has a Psychology degree (No offense to you at all, Dr. Sutton).

[Another executive] was famous for bullying vendors, yelling at them on the phone, slamming desks and drawers, etc.. He would also do this by using his blue-tooth ear-piece and his cell phone as he walked around the office, yelling on the phone.

They hired another A$$hole (You wrote that A$$holes tend to hire other A$$holes). He was most lethal behind a computer, where he would send scathing emails to co-workers. However, he would not limit his exchanges to emails, as my colleague would often complain that he said things—NOT in private—like, "If you think you need a raise, then maybe you should quit and get another job."

I literally witnessed my manager turn into an A$$hole overtime due to over-exposure to the A$$hole Family. In the beginning, he was an optimistic, friendly, driven, trustworthy manager. 6+ years later, he scowled and glared at co-workers; he became two-faced; I lost trust in him.

I love this summary, it is sad but funny at the same time:

There is such an infestation of A$$holes at this company that someone should tent the building and spray it with A$$hole insecticide. I could go on for pages about these stories. I wish I had documented more of them, because some of them were really funny.

Then, he tells us how he too started catching the sickness -- as I have written here many times, bad behavior is contagious. Thank goodness, he and his colleagues hatched exit plans:

After working there for a year, I realized that I was turning into an A$$hole: I was losing my temper with vendors on the phone; my stress-level was getting too high to manage; and I started to send more scathing emails. It also started to affect my personal life, as I would come home from work and lose my temper with my partner for no reason. I then realized that I needed to get out. Nothing I could do would help me manage this job long-term. So, 3 of my colleagues and I all made a pact to get new jobs as quickly as possible.

Finally, I was especially taken with his description of the things he did to cope with the infestation of assholes around him, many are consistent with my survival tips, others are new twists and turns. Here is most of his list:

I confronted [a boss] about him throwing me under the bus. I explained to him that after throwing me under the bus, I become anxious, nervous, embarrassed, and I cannot concentrate, which greater increases my chances for making mistakes. My solution was to instead speak to me in private about a way that we can work together to reduce any mistakes and increase productivity for our whole department. He never threw me under the bus again (to my face, anyway), but he never took me up on the offer to speak with me about how to help improve my job performance, as well as my co-workers.

Wrote in my daily journal (this was a tremendous small win; I could vent my frustrations and focus on my strategy to get out of the A$$hole Factory. I still write in my journal)

Using any downtime at work to apply for other jobs

Using the "I have a doctor's appointment" excuse to go on job interviews

The President/CEO ran for a political post. I voted for the other guy.

Working as hard as possible at my job, so that when I left, it would be difficult to replace me

Wear headphones to drown out the A$$holes yelling across the office at one another

Piled things like my briefcase and books near the entrance to my cubicle so A$$holes could not enter un-invited

Deleted scathing emails and never responding to them instead of responding and escalating into email World War III

Gave 2 weeks notice: No more, no less

Again, I don't usually provide so much detail, but this fellow did such a brilliant job of showing what an asshole infested workplace looks and feels like, the negative effects it has on everyone in its grips, and of listing the little and big things he did to cope with it. And, thank goodness, he realized he needed to escape and eventually got out -- while protecting himself along the way.

I won't name him (even though he said it was OK, I think a bit of discretion is in order). But I do want to thank this anonymous reader for taking the time to write me such a long note and for doing it so well.

Tomorrow morning, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky and I are going to spend an hour at The Churchill Club talking about Apple and what other organizations and leaders can (and cannot) learn from the world's most (economically) valuable company. If you want to attend, I think you can tickets here still available and I understand they are filming our discussion (I will let you know how to see the video when I find out).

Part of me believes that Apple and Jobs have much to teach other companies and leaders. But, as I wrote in the new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback, part of me is starting to wonder if what each of us "learns" from Steve Jobs amazing life reveals more about our inner selves -- our personalities, preferences, and personal experiences -- than anything else. Below is the excerpt from Good Boss, Bad Boss where I toy with this argument (I edited it slightly because one sentence doesn't make sense unless you read the whole chapter).

I am writing this epilogue in December 2011, two months after the death of Steve Jobs, the most talked-about boss and innovator of our time. Like many others, I found Jobs’s great strengths, startling weaknesses, and bizarre quirks to be fascinating. For example, I wrote about him in The No Asshole Rule (in the chapter on “The Virtues of Assholes”). Even though Jobs’s nastiness was well documented before Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography was published, I was a bit shocked by tidbits in the book. As his death loomed, Jobs ran through sixty-seven nurses before finding three he liked. Still, there is no denying Jobs’s genius. Even though I would not have wanted to work for him, his design sensibilities, his ability to build great teams, and (in his later years) the way he structured a large organization that moved at the speed of a small one are admirable.

Recently, however, I had two experiences that led me to believe it is difficult for bosses who want to improvetheir craft to learn from Steve Jobs. The first came after I had taught a two-hour session on innovation to forty CEOs of midsized Chinese companies. None spoke English and I don’t speak Mandarin, so there was a translator to enable communication. I put up a few Steve Job quotes and had fun figuring out that thirty-eight of the forty CEOs had iPhones. During the question-and-answer period, they seemed obsessed with Jobs.

The most interesting thing happened, however, after I ended the session. As I left, one CEO grabbed the microphone and started hollering into it, and as I walked outside for another meeting, they were yelling at each other. The translator told me they were arguing over whether Jobs was an asshole and whether they should emulate such behavior to be better bosses. When I came back thirty minutes later, the translators ran up to me— laughing—because those CEOs were still arguing over the same thing.

As I was driving home, I started thinking that Steve Jobs (or at least the idea of Steve Jobs) was so vivid, socomplicated, and so idolized that for those CEOs, he was like an inkblot test: they projected their inner beliefs, values, desires, and justifications for their behavior onto him. The conversation was sparked by Jobs, but the content had little or nothing to do with what Jobs was like in life or in the lessons he could teach those CEOs.

Then, a couple weeks later, I went to a party and talked with two people who worked closely with Jobs for years.They started pretty much the same argument that those Chinese executives had. Although one asserted the gooddeeds Jobs had done weren’t emphasized enough in media reports or the Isaacson biography, they nonetheless started arguing (and people who hadn’t worked for Jobs jumped in) about whether Jobs’s success meant it was wise or acceptable to be a jerk and when it was worth tolerating an asshole boss. As I listened, I believed once again that the idea of Steve Jobs was prompting people to make sense of and justify their behavior, personal values, and pet theories.

So I raised my hypothesis: that people couldn’t learn much from Jobs. That he was so hyped, so complex, andapparently inconsistent that the “lessons” they derived from him where really more about who they were and hoped to be than about Jobs himself. The two people who worked closely with him agreed. And one added another reason why Jobs was and is a bad role model for bosses: Steve had such a weird and rare brain that it simply isn’t possible for another human being to copy him anyway!

I am curious, what do you think? As I re-read this, part of me still believes the argument above and part of me still believes that, well, every boss and innovator can learn something from him (despite the biases we all bring to the table). I also find it easier to think about Apple and its organization and management in a detached way than about Jobs -- perhaps because an organization, even Apple, could never have a personality and presence as vivid and intriguing as Mr. Jobs had.

P.S. The event at the Churchill Club was really fun, in part, because Adam and I didn't fully agree with each other. I especially disagreed with his arguments that Apple was unique in terms of its structure (especially how centralized it is for its size). We agreed on most things. But we had more fun and learned more -- and I think the audience did too -- because we pushed each other to refine or logic and examples. He is a smart and charming guy.

This isn't the first time I have written a post like this, but the experience a No Asshole Rule fan had with Amazon today reminded me of how weird their policies are around the book's title. In short, if you write a review of the book, and you use the word "asshole, they not only reject it, they won't let you edit it or submit another review. Over the years, at least ten people who have written submitted positive reviews have written me to complain about this problem (I suspect people who have written negative reviews have the same problem, but they don't write me).

I got a new one today from Bill. There isn't much hope of changing the policy: I've tried and so has my publisher. Bill, we will try again but will probably fail. But I do appreciate all the effort you took to write such a nice and detailed review even if Amazon won't print it.

Also, to all readers, note Bill only used the word "Asshole" once, at the very end,when he mentioned the book's title. But that was enough for Amazon's automated screening to kill the review and freeze him out from repairing it or submitting another one!

This review is from: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't (Paperback)

Through eight years of higher education, and 20-odd years in the work-force, this book is the most important, eye-opening, business self-help book I have ever read; it literally changed my way of thinking about myself as a professional, and my functioning as an employee. I have recommended it to hundreds of college students and dozens of colleagues and friends. I have lent it to and bought it for people who needed protection from JERKS in their own places of work, and I have given it as a gift to people whom I could see had the potential to become JERK bosses - as an inoculation, if you will.

In all my years of gainful employment, I had never spent more than 3 years at any one job, picking up and leaving each time because of the JERKS (or so I thought) to whom I had to answer and with whom I had to contend. Repeatedly, I found myself saying, "I will not be associated with him/her," and then I picked up my family and moved to a new city and a new job, where I kept finding the same problems - JERKS were everywhere!

I listened to this book on CD (a good recording by actor Kerin McCue) and then read the print version after having separated from my last place of work in the industry in which I had intended to make my entire career. Filled with anger and bitterness at having been treated poorly, bullied, and abruptly canned after seven months of my new three-year contract in my new city, Professor Sutton's book finally helped me to recognize my own role in all of this - I had never learned how to deal with JERKS, and I didn't recognize how much power I was letting them have over me (and therefore my family, as well).

Since experiencing the revelations this book offered, I have launched a new career in a different, but related, industry, and I am once again climbing the corporate ladder in a company for which I have now been working for five years and going strong. I am much happier and more relaxed as a professional than ever before. I still have to contend with JERKS, but they do not bother me anymore. I have come to realize that their being horrible human beings has nothing to do with me, and they would be horrible to anyone else, as well, which is where I am now able to step in and offer support and perspective to others.

I only wish this book had been written and published two years earlier! If it had, I would still be earning twice the money I am now. Nevertheless, The No Asshole Rule helped me to understand myself and my career, and laid the groundwork for my current and future success.

I was talking with a journalist from Men's Health today about how bosses can become more aware of how they act and are seen by the people they lead, and how so many bosses (like most human-beings) can be clueless of how they come across to others. This reminded of a method I used some years back with one boss that proved pretty effective for helping him come to grips with his overbearing and "all transmission, no reception" style; here is how it is described inGood Boss, Bad Boss:

A few years ago, I did a workshop with a management team that was suffering from “group dynamics problems.” In particular, team members felt their boss, a senior vice-president, was overbearing, listened poorly, and routinely “ran over” others. The VP denied all this and called his people “thin-skinned wimps.”

I asked the team – the boss and five direct reports -- to do a variation of an exercise I’ve used in the classroom for years. They spent about 20 minutes brainstorming ideas about products their business might bring to market; they then spent 10 minutes narrowing their choices to just three: The most feasible, wildest, and most likely to fail. But as the group brainstormed and made these decisions, I didn’t pay attention to the content of their ideas. Instead, I worked with a couple others from the company to make rough counts of the number of comments made by each member, the number of times each interrupted other members, and the number of times each was interrupted. During this short exercise, the VP made about 65% of the comments, interrupted others at least 20 times, and was never interrupted once. I then had the VP leave the room after the exercise and asked his five underlings to estimate the results; their recollections were quite accurate, especially about their boss’s stifling actions. When we brought the VP back in, he recalled making about 25% of the comments, interrupting others two or three times, and being interrupted three or four times. When we gave the boss the results, and told him that his direct reports made far more accurate estimates, he was flabbergasted and a bit pissed-off at everyone in the room.

As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high status primate in any group: The creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them.

My colleague Huggy Rao has a related test he uses to determine if a boss is leading in ways that enables him or her to stay in tune with others. In addition to how much the boss talks, Huggy counts the proportion of statements the boss makes versus the number of questions asked. "Transmit only bosses" make lots of statements and assertions and ask few questions.

What do you think of these assessment methods? What other methods have you used to determine how self-aware and sensitive you are other bosses are -- and to makes things better?

Tomorrow is the official publication day for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback. It contains a new chapter called "What Great Bosses Do," which digs into some of the lessons I learned about leadership since publishing the hardback in September 2010. I have already published excerpts from the new chapter on power poisoning, bad apples, and embracing the mess at Fast Company.

As I am teaching all day tomorrow, I am publishing another here today excerpt here to mark the occasion. It considers one of the most personally troubling lessons I've learned (or at least am on the verge of believing). I am starting to wonder, as the headline says, if nice but incompetent bosses are even worse (at least in some ways and at certain times) than competent assholes.

Now, to be clear, they both suck and having to choose between the two is sort of like deciding whether to be kicked in the stomach or kicked in the head. And I have even suggested here that there might be certain advantages to having a lousy boss (and readers came up with numerous other great reasons). But I have seen so much damage done by lousy bosses who are really nice people in recent years that I am starting to wonder...

Here is the excerpt from the new chapter (the 4th of 9 lessons):

4. Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people—journalists, employees,project managers, even a few CEOs—who picked a fight with me. They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human beings; they make sure the job gets done. I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely. Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point— and thought about some lousy bosses—I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.”

As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels. I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip up you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “Nice guys finish last” is sometimes right is that when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors, too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.

People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires. He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important e-mails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront—let alone fire—destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

There are two lessons here. The first is for bosses. If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provideprotective armor when things go wrong. Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as wellas second and third chances—sometimes even if you are incompetent. I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss—but care as much for others as they do for you—stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers. Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed—or things are falling apart too fast to risk it—the time has come to hit the delete button.

I spent the morning trying to organize and make sense of various materials that Huggy Rao and I have been gathering about scaling. I came across a most interesting post on "Learnings from 2011" that was apparently written by Xenios Thrasyvoulou, CEO of European-based start-up called Peopleperhour.com, which enables you to hire people "remotely, for small projects or a few hours a week."

The post was quite interesting, well-crafted and introspective. But the advice at the end stopped me in my tracks:

“Life is too short to waste it with people who don’t get it, whatever “it” may be for you, so make sure you surround yourself with people who do”

This is such good advice because human attitudes and behaviors are so infectious. If you are surrounded with a bunch of smart, graceful, caring, and action-oriented people, all that goodness will rub-off on you; and if you are surrounded with a bunch of people with the opposite attributes, that will infect you too. This is why who you choose to hang out with, hire, fire, spend time with, and avoid has so much influence on everything from acting like an asshole, to building a creative organization, to scaling-ip excellence, to living a happy life.

Yet, implementing this philosophy in real life isn't easy. I would love to hear some ideas about how people make it happen.

Last week, I wrote a post saying how much I liked The Power of Habit, while at the same time, I confessed that I didn't much like the cover. As I emphasized, it was a lesson that the old you "you can't judge a book by its cover" was true, but I do think that great cover designs are hard to achieve and continue to appreciate nice ones. Above, you can see one I really like, for Gretchen Rubin's forthcoming Happier at Home. Recall Gretchen is the author of the blockbuster The Happiness Project (which I reviewed here as a self-help book for people who hate self-help books). This cover is not only beautiful, it matches her title and identity very well. I am not sure when her new book comes out, but I am looking forward to it.